Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 43

Do-It-Yourself Ebooks #1. Getting Started.

I plan to put up a series of three or so posts about the topic of how to epublish books on your own. In these posts I’ll focus on doing it all yourself. I’m going to describe the specific series of steps that I’m taking to epublish my Transreal Books.

Don’t take everything I say for gospel. There are many paths through the thickets of epub, and I’m only now beginning to find my way. I posted on this topic last fall, and revised that post in February, 2012, and by now I’ve expanding my understanding about many of the things in the old post. So it’s time to try again.

Posting the information seems worthwhile as I’ve really had quite a bit of trouble in learning it. Epublishing abounds with gotchas. But clearly its time has come.

Distribution: Kindle, NOOK, iBook, Direct

So suppose I have a document and I want to make it into an ebook. Let’s start by describing the steps you can use to distribute your ebook once it’s done.

There are four main channels for distributing ebooks:

(1) Amazon Kindle,

(2) Barnes and Noble NOOK,

(3) the Apple iBook store.

(4) Your own website. You can create MOBI and EPUB format books so as to reach all existing ereaders.

Regarding the corporate channels, the ebook market share figures are constantly being debated, revised, and spun. As of 2012, it may be that Amazon sells close to 70% of ebooks, B&N close to 20%, and iBook around 7%, with a variety of smaller channels picking up the crumbs.

One thing to keep in mind from the start is that you can distribute through all of these channels for free—provided you have a certain amount of patience and a good tolerance for pain. You can pay various intermediaries to set up distribution for you, but don’t make the mistake of paying a large up-front fee for this service and/or the mistake of cutting them in for the lion’s share of your royalties.

Set-Up

You need to set up your corporate distribution accounts. Search for “Amazon KDP” (Kindle Direct Publishing) to get an account for distributing Kindle ebooks. Search for “Barnes and Noble PubIt” to get set up for distributing NOOK. Search for “Lulu ebook” to get an account that will distribute to Apple iBooks.

I know there are alternate paths to the iBook market, as well as to the crumb-level channels. But to keep things simple, I’m going to stick to KDP, PubIt, Lulu, and your own indie website.

Another initial step (not absolutely necessary) is to invent a name for your publishing enterprise, and to purchase an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for your book. You do this by seraching for “Bowker ISBN” and buying one or several ISBNs—they’re not hugely expensive. The gain with having your own ISBN is that it makes it easier to get your distributors to attribute your book to your personal publisher name. Note that some people say that you need a different ISBN for each distribution channel. My preference is to quietly use one particular ISBN for all of a given ebook’s channels.

Now a bit about distributing your ebooks from your own website.

First you want to get a PayPal account so people can easily pay you. Note that PayPal is set up to accept credit card charges from customers who don’t have a PayPal account of their own.

Second you need a service to handle the process of collecting money from the customers and getting copies of the ebook to them. I’m finding that the relatively inexpensive ($5 per month with no extra per-book charges) service E-Junkie works well for me. Be careful here, there are some rip-off services that do the same thing, but who charge you a very high monthly fee and who take something like 10% of all your sales.

Third you’ll need to set up a webpage describing your ebook or ebooks, complete with purchase links (which will redirect them to, let us say, E-Junkie, who’ll collect customer info, chage them via PayPal and email the customers a download link).

EPUB and MOBI Formats

Ebooks are distributed in two main formats: EPUB and MOBI. What are they?

EPUB is the richer and more universal format. Basically, an EPUB file is like a compressed website. It’s a package file that holds all the elements of a website. Specifically, an EPUB holds a Text directory with one or more HTML files with your text in it, a Styles directory with a CSS style sheet to control the styles used in your text, an Images directory with JPG image files for each image in your text, a TOC file with a table of contents, and a funky OPF “manifest” file that describes how the pieces fit together. It’s a website wrapped in a package.

The Barnes and Noble NOOK reads EPUB, as does the iBook app.

There are various ways to turn your DOC or RTF text file into an EPUB file—I’ll discuss both an easy way and a harder way of doing this.

MOBI is the Kindle ebook file format, it’s a more primitive kind of package file that, like EPUB, holds text, images, table of contents, and a “manifest.” Amazon changes the name of this format to AZW. You can’t make AZW files at home, but it’s rather easy to convert an EPUB file into a MOBI. We’ll talk about this in a bit. The thing to remember is that first you need to make an EPUB, and making the MOBI after that is practically effortless (modulo a bit of screwing around with some tags).

Keep in mind that if you want to give away or to sell your book from your own website, you’ll need to make EPUB and MOBI versions of it at home. And, once again, if you have these two formats, then you can reach all the ereading devices or apps in existence.

But—if you can’t face the tweaking ordeal of making EPUB and MOBI, you can simply sell your book via the three big channels.

Amazon KDP will accept MOBI, EPUB, HTML, DOC or RTF.

Barnes and Noble PubIt will accept EPUB, HTML, DOC, or RTF.

Lulu will accept EPUB or DOC.

So…if you don’t want to do indie distribution, you can just clean up your DOC or RTF and upload it to Amazon and to Barnes & Noble. And upload a clean DOC to Lulu for the iBook market as well.

Making your own EPUB and MOBI: Why and How?

There are two main reasons to make your own EPUB and MOBI.

First of all, it gives you better control over how your ebook will actually look. In particular, making your own epub allows you to put nice-looking illustrations into your book.

Secondly, as I keep saying, if you want to distribute indie ebooks on your own, you need to get them into EPUB and MOBI—and really this just means getting them into EPUB, as the EPUB to MOBI conversion is so simple.

So now lets talk about how you make an EPUB and a MOBI.

You’re going to use three very good free software tools Calibre and Sigil , and the Kindle Previewer. These tools do different things, and you need both of them. They’re constantly being updated, so check for updates every so often.

Calibre converts files from one format to another. And can use Calibre to edit the so-called metadata (title, author’s name, ISBN, publisher name, etc.) in your files.

Typically you use Calibre to convert RTF or HTML into EPUB and then into MOBI. That is, you shoot for getting the EPUB the way you want it first, and only then do you convert to MOBI.

The Calibre conversion process is automatic, although there are a rather large number of Conversion settings you can tweak to affect the outputs. It usually takes multiple iterations until you get the settings and the outputs just right. Calibre also has a primitive ereader window that lets you look at the current states of your EPUB and your MOBI. When you’re happy you can save your EPUB and MOBI files to disk, and try them out in other ereaders. And you’re free to return to Calibre and change the files some more.

Sigil allows you to tweak your EPUB file in various ways: you can edit or wholly replace the text, add or remove images, alter the Table of Contents, and more. Sigil also has the ability to verify if your current EPUB has any format errors in it, and it helps you fix them.

Kindle Previewer autoconverts an EPUB into a MOBI and lets you preview how the MOBI will look on the various kinds of Kindle devices.

Three Work Flows

I’ve used three different work flows in making your EPUB and MOBI: a simple level, an medium level, and an advanced level. (I won’t be talking about pro-level use of Quark or InDesign for making EPUB files, as I’ve never used these tools.)

Simple Level

* Clean up your DOC or RTF file.

* If you’ve been using DOC, now save it as an RTF.

* Use Calibre to convert your RTF into an EPUB.

* Use the Sigil software to verify the EPUB and to do minor edits on it.

* Use Calibre or the Kindle Previewer to convert the EPUB into a MOBI.

Medium Level

* Clean up your DOC or RTF file.

* Convert your DOC or RTF into an HTML file, then tweak the HTML

* Use Calibre to convert your HTML into an EPUB.

* Use the Sigil software to verify and to correct problems in the EPUB.

* Use Calibre or the Kindle Previewer to convert the EPUB into a MOBI.

Advanced Level

* Clean up your DOC file.

* Use Dreamweaver to convert your DOC into an HTML file, then use Dreamweaver to clean and tweak the HTML. Create a CSS stylesheet for the HTML.

* Use Sigil to directly create an EPUB from your HTML, from an associated CSS stylesheet you’ve created, and from images that you’ve properly sized.

* Bounce back and forth between Dreamweaver and Sigil, finding and correcting problems in the EPUB.

* Use Calibre or the Kindle Previewer to convert the EPUB into a MOBI.

In the later posts in this series, I’ll talk about the steps of these workflows, and about such issues as how to handle covers, internal images, tables, styles and tables of contents.

But if you’re eager to start experimenting, you could give the simple workflow level a try right now, just to see what your EPUB might look like. Make a copy of some document you like, put it into a Playpen directory, and let Calibre munge on it. One thing worth stressing: always keep an Archive directory where you keep the best forms of your DOC, EPUB, HTML or whatever files for your ebook. Calibre has a way of screwing with the files that you load into it, and you don’t want to overwrite your archived files with the screwed-with files.

For getting started, there’s an online Calibre user manual to help you along. The MobileRead forums have a huge amount of info if you use the Search box. And simply Googling your questions often leads to good answers—although there’s a lot of inaccurate jabbering as well.

Collected Essays, at Transreal Books

A new Transreal Books title goes live today!

Now selling for $4.95. Go to the Transreal Books page to buy the book from Amazon or to buy the Epub or Mobi (for Kindle) files directly from Transreal Books. Barnes & Noble link coming soon. Book will eventually be in the iBook store as well.

Collected Essays includes the nonfiction pieces from my two earlier collections, Transreal! (1991) and Seek! (1999). And many, many newer essays have been added as well. How to write, history of Silicon Valley, semi-technical articles on graphics, the philosophy of computer science, travel notes, off-beat memoirs—it’s all here.

Collected Essays weighs in at twice the length of an ordinary book, with sixty articles and about a hundred illustrations, many in color.

The essays fall into seven parts:

(1) “The Art of Writing.” Manifestos and talks about writing science-fiction.

(2) “Silicon Valley.” Cool scenes Rucker witnessed as he rode the Silicon Valley computer wave for over twenty years, starting in 1986.

(3) “Weird Screens.” Graphical programs that have obsessed Rucker—cellular automata, artificial life, fractals, space curves, and virtual reality.

(4) “Futurology.” Playful raps and speculations about the coming times.

(5) “The Philosophy of Computation.” Digital immortality, artificial intelligence, and the birth of a universal mind.

(6) “Personal Stories.” Tall tales and reminscences of strange times.

(7) “Mentors.” Appreciations of the great minds and wild freaks who led Rucker along his path: Kurt Gödel, Martin Gardner, Robert Scheckley, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ivan Stang and Stephen Wolfram.

Go get it at Transreal Books .

NYC #2. Museums. Ground Zero.

I’ve been kind of strung-out on computer programming for the last month. Turning some of my old stuff into ebooks. I keep meaning to write up a detailed “how to publish an ebook,” but I keep learning new stuff. So many gotchas.l

I’ll be announcing my new ebook, Collected Essays, on Monday or Tuesday, and it’ll be available via several channels on my Transreal Books site. But today is Saturday, and not a good time to launch a web product. Today I’m mainly posting more photos from our trip to Manhattan early in March.

As I mentioned, we were on the 34th floor of a hotel on 8th Ave near Times Square. The window actually opened, a little bit, and it was so awesome to look down at the people. Great morning shadows of the cyclists.

And the skyscrapers at night. Another world.

The Met has a renovated section of art from the Arabian countries. Wonderful stuff. One of my favorites was this calligraphic emblem called a “tughra,” from the court of Süleyman the Magnificent, 1555. The pieces of it stand for parts of Süleyman’s titular name. But the details make it rather conspicuously difficult to forge.

Interesting Babylonian art near the Arabian art wing of the Met, too. R. Crumb used to draw flying vulture demonesses. Maybe he’d done some actual art-historical research.

Naturally we hit the MOMA as well. Nice atrium. Great to see the golden oldies of modern art upstairs. For some reason Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror” is in storage. The biggest draw right now is van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Kind of a weird 21st century crowd in front of it, all foreign tourists, and every single one is holding up a camera or cell phone to get a picture of the actual painting in actual real life—photography is allowed, and by now everyone finally understands not to use their flash. But weird to have this anenome mass of arms with cameras on the tips. SFictional.

The really great new thing at the MOMA was a retrospective show of Cindy Sherman’s work. I looked it over first with Sylvia, then with our cinematographer friend Eddie Marritz. We liked her early work “Untitled Film Stills” almost the best, the way Cindy looks so neutral in the images, like stills from European films, she said. Lot’s of exhibition eye-candy here.

I don’t think I mentioned that in this gallery where I did my reading, the Soho Gallery of Digital Art, they had about thirty computer display screens on the walls. So they can put up any show at all with an hour or two of fiddling with the central controller machine. I’d emailed them a link to my paintings site, so they had a lot of my paintings “on” the walls. Was nice to see them.

Yet another museum to mention is the Whitney. They had the Biennial show. Like so many Biennials, this was “the worst one yet.” Nobody takes the time/trouble to develop any craftsmanship anymore. Piles of garbage on the floors, YouTube-level videos of like a woman chewing food and spitting it out. An artist sleeping on a bed installed in the Whitney galler. Six art-school-hallway-type paintings with unmixed colors right out of the tube painted in *wow* squares along the edge of the cheapest possible pre-stretched canvases. It’s all about the accompanying rap. The best thing I saw at the Whitney was a pile of blue-painted wood things leaning outside. (Droned the old man.)

The good old Empire State building is still there, so 1940s, such a dowager. Looking at it near the city-block-sized Macy’s. You don’t specifically find what you’re looking for in a store that big, everything is scattered around. Eventually you happen on what you need. Or on something like it.

We went down to Ground Zero, former site of the World Trade Center. Out in California, I’d had the mistaken impression that they were still stalled in arguments about what to build. But they’re moving right along. Lots of cranes, and there’s a new tower growing up.

The memorial in the central area is deeply moving. They have two square holes in the ground, exactly matching the footprints of the fallen towers. In each hole, water flows down the sides, across a flat part at the bottom, then down into a black pit.

Kind of like the course of life. You come from who knows where, sparkle in the sun, end up on a level plateau, then disappear into darkness.

All the names of the dead are cut into the heavy metal railings around the edges. This is one of the the most moving monuments I’ve ever seen, along with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in DC.

And how are you supposed to feel about it? Sorrowful, certainly. Wistful for the more peaceful times before. But—vengeful, angry, bellicose? That’s natural too. But you don’t want to take it out on a whole country or a whole region of the world.

I don’t see why President Obama doesn’t get more credit for finally tracking down Osama Bin Laden. It was good to get that done. A step towards closure.

And the rebuilding at ground zero is wonderful to see.

Manhattan is, at some meta-level, a living organism. Energy flows down the long avenues in the morning, with each crossing lit by the rising sun. It’s a hive, Manhattan, an anthill, an indestructible giant paramecium. Long may it wave!

NYC #1, plus Two Podcasts (Interview, Anarchy)

I’m a little behind on the journal aspect of my blog. This month I was busy finishing issue #13 of Flurb, and then converting the issue into ebook format. But before that, my wife and I were out in NYC for a week. So today I want to blog some of that.

Actually, before New York, I need to post this picture of the hippo at the San Francisco zoo. Hippos are among my very favorite animals. The comely bulk, their smoothness, their nimble lightness on their feet, and the fact that they’re said to be quite vicious and dangerous if encountered in the wild.

One of the things I did in NY was to do an interview and give a reading from Nested Scrolls at a gallery in Soho. This was organized by Jim Freund in connection with his New York Review of Science Fiction reading series and his Hour of the Wolf radio show — here’s a link to a stream of the show online, though I’m not sure how long the link will keep working. I start up about five minutes into the stream, and the show contains both my interview and my reading.

(Thoth in the Met)

Streams aren’t a convenient medium for listening on-the-go. The picture above shows me on the left fruitlessly trying to extract an mp3 of my interview from Jim Freund, partially seen on the right. He eluded the flail of Thoth! No matter. What I finally did was to capture the stream with Audacity on my computer, and then edited the interview out of the Hour of the Wolf show. And a very good interview, too. Jim’s good at this. I added it to my Feedburner collection of podcasts, click on the button below. (And I put a hint about capturing streams in the comments section down at the end of today’s blog post.)

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

Speaking of my Podcasts, let me jump away from NYC and up to the present for a moment. Today I was up at the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco and I did a panel with Terry Bisson and John Shirley. Our theme was “Anarchism and Science Fiction,” and I got a good recording of the hour-long panel. We had a nice big audience—anarchist kids in their twenties or thirties, very shaggy and bright-eyed. Not a typical SF crowd at all—actually I don’t think they were in fact SF readers. But fun to talk to. You can click on the Feedburner button above to access both the Freund interview podcast and the “Anarchism and SF” panel podcast.

Okay, back to New York. We lucked into a great room in the Intercontinental near Times Square. The window even opened, a little bit, and I could peer down at wonderfully tiny Manhattanites with their early morning shadows.

The white ways of the night.

There was this burger place downstairs, the Shake Shack, at Eighth Ave and 44th St, I became mildly obsessed with the name, saying it over and over. Always a line there, every hour of the day. There’s another Shake Shack in Madison Square near the Flatiron Building—where I always go to visit Tor Books, where I was doing most of my publishing from from 1999 – 2011. An autumnal feeling at Tor this time, who knows how many more times I’ll go there.

Publishing is in such a fierce state of change. Authors are like the dinosaurs after that big meteor crashed into the Gulf of Mexico a zillion years ago. We’re trying to turn into birds as fast as we can. This object above is an Espresso Book Machine which I saw in this really great Soho bookstore, McNally Jackson Books. You can print off a print-on-demand book on the spot there, even one of your own if you want.

Print-on-demand is already fading, though, it was a weird stilt-legged trilobite of the Cambrian explosion. Ebooks are where it’s at now, where “now” might last five years. Publishing is very chaotic just now, I’ve never seen it like this. It’s like the carriage business the year after Henry Ford starting selling the Model A.

I’m glad I’m learning how to make ebooks. I’ve got my Transreal Books page working pretty well, with my Collected Stories on it, and my Collected Essays coming online soon. I made an ebook Flurb of issue #13 as well, and next fall if I can work things out with my authors and the technology, I may put together a Completely Flurb: E Flurbus Unum ebook omnibus that’s about a hundred megabytes in size. Go frikkin’ wild with this sh*t.

Anyway, back to NYC. Always so great to be in Central Park, the classic contrast between the skyscrapers and the old trees and grassy swards with humans at rest and play. Very New Yorker cover.

My wife and I have been to NYC so many times over the years, it’s kind of a constant in this changing world, the frail honks (Love the minatory traffic signs: DON’T HONK (what part of that don’t you understand??)), the siren wails, the rumble and jostle, the shuffle of feet, the smells, the windows at Bonwit’s, the rhythms of the subways, the ballet at the Joyce, the ubiquity of the New Yorkers, curt but not unkind.

I always smile when I see the perennial Army Recruitment Center in Times Square. It’s been there as long as I can remember, maybe forty years. I always imagine a group of guys on a wild spree in the Big Apple and then, late at night or in dawn’s early light, one of them reels into the Recruitment Center like a disoriented lobster who’s crookedly tail-snapping his way into a trap.

Later that day…“So this is Fort Dix!”

We happened upon the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, and I posed for a photo on it—I actually did this once already, in 2005, and the reason I like to do this is that I’m thereby emulating my boyhood hero and my first actual writing mentor, Martin Gardner, who wrote a wonderful column for Scientific American for many years.

Dear Martin. He lent me about twenty rare books on the fourth dimension in 1982 when I was writing my nonfiction book, The Fourth Dimension. And now he’s dead.

Beautiful tree-shadows on the wall of the Met. And our bodies are shadows of our souls. How many dimensions?

NYC #1, plus "Anarachism & SF" Podcast

I'm a little behind on the journal aspect of my blog. This month I was busy finishing issue #13 of Flurb, and then converting the issue into ebook format. But before that, my wife and I were out in NYC for a week. So today I want to blog some of that.

Actually, before New York, I need to post this picture of the hippo at the San Francisco zoo. Hippos are among my very favorite animals. The comely bulk, their smoothness, their nimble lightness on their feet, and the fact that they're said to be quite vicious and dangerous if encountered in the wild.

One of the things I did in NY was to do an interview and give a reading from Nested Scrolls at a gallery in Soho. This was organized by Jim Freund in connection with his New York Review of Science Fiction reading series and his Hour of the Wolf radio show — here's a link to a stream of the show online, though I'm not sure how long the link will keep working. I think I start up about five minutes into the stream, and I think the show contains both my interview and my reading. Eventually I hope to get the mp3 from Jim and trim it down and put it onto my Feedburner collection of podcasts.

(Thoth in the Met)

Speaking of my Podcasts, let me jump away from NYC and up to the present for a moment. Today I was up at the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco and I did a panel with Terry Bisson and John Shirley. Our theme was "Anarchism and Science Fiction," and I got a good recording of the hour-long panel. We had a nice big audience—anarchist kids in their twenties or thirties, very shaggy and bright-eyed. Not a typical SF crowd at all—actually I don't think they were in fact SF readers. But fun to talk to. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

Okay, back to New York. We lucked into a great room in the Intercontinental near Times Square. The window even opened, a little bit, and I could peer down at wonderfully tiny Manhattanites with their early morning shadows.

The white ways of the night.

There was this burger place downstairs, the Shake Shack, at Eighth Ave and 44th St, I became mildly obsessed with the name, saying it over and over. Always a line there, every hour of the day. There's another Shake Shack in Madison Square near the Flatiron Building—where I always go to visit Tor Books, where I was doing most of my publishing from from 1999 – 2011. An autumnal feeling at Tor this time, who knows how many more times I'll go there.

Publishing is in such a fierce state of change. Authors are like the dinosaurs after that big meteor crashed into the Gulf of Mexico a zillion years ago. We're trying to turn into birds as fast as we can. This object above is an Espresso Book Machine which I saw in this really great Soho bookstore, McNally Jackson Books. You can print off a print-on-demand book on the spot there, even one of your own if you want.

Print-on-demand is already fading, though, it was a weird stilt-legged trilobite of the Cambrian explosion. Ebooks are where it's at now, where "now" might last five years. Publishing is very chaotic just now, I've never seen it like this. It's like the carriage business the year after Henry Ford starting selling the Model A.

I'm glad I'm learning how to make ebooks. I've got my Transreal Books page working pretty well, with my Collected Stories on it, and my Collected Essays coming online soon. I made an ebook Flurb of issue #13 as well, and next fall if I can work things out with my authors and the technology, I may put together a Completely Flurb: E Flurbus Unum ebook omnibus that's about a hundred megabytes in size. Go frikkin' wild with this sh*t.

Anyway, back to NYC. Always so great to be in Central Park, the classic contrast between the skyscrapers and the old trees and grassy swards with humans at rest and play. Very New Yorker cover.

My wife and I have been to NYC so many times over the years, it's kind of a constant in this changing world, the frail honks (Love the minatory traffic signs: DON'T HONK (what part of that don't you understand??)), the siren wails, the rumble and jostle, the shuffle of feet, the smells, the windows at Bonwit's, the rhythms of the subways, the ballet at the Joyce, the ubiquity of the New Yorkers, curt but not unkind.

I always smile when I see the perennial Army Recruitment Center in Times Square. It's been there as long as I can remember, maybe forty years. I always imagine a group of guys on a wild spree in the Big Apple and then, late at night or in dawn's early light, one of them reels into the Recruitment Center like a disoriented lobster who's crookedly tail-snapping his way into a trap.

Later that day…"So this is Fort Dix!"

We happened upon the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, and I posed for a photo on it—I actually did this once already, in 2005, and the reason I like to do this is that I'm thereby emulating my boyhood hero and my first actual writing mentor, Martin Gardner, who wrote a wonderful column for Scientific American for many years.

Dear Martin. He lent me about twenty rare books on the fourth dimension in 1982 when I was writing my nonfiction book, The Fourth Dimension. And now he's dead.

Beautiful tree-shadows on the wall of the Met. How many dimensions? And that's enough for today's blog post.

Flurb #13 Goes Mobile!

March 27, 2012.

Yeah, baby. With much programming and sweat, I've turned Flurb #13 into an ebook that can be read on any ereading device—Kindles, iPhones, Androids, NOOKs, Windows laptops, iPads, whatever.

Mobi (for Kindle) and Epub (for the others) now available for free download at

http://www.flurb.net/ebook/

Go for it!

March 23, 2012

Issue #13 of Flurb is out, with astonishing tales by thirteen writers: Albrecht, Ashby, Cha, Deitch, Garcia, Garrison, Hayes, Highsmith, Rucker, Quaglia, Salinas, Watson, What, Worrad!

This brings us into the sixth year of Flurb since the first issue, with 164 stories published in all.

Go to www.flurb.net and be among the first of the sixty thousand or so people who'll be checking out our new issue over the coming months!

Enjoy the gnarl, dear readers, it's good for you.

And when you take a break, come back here and post something encouraging in the comments section below. Our intrepid authors need and deserve your support.

Flurb #13

Issue #13 of Flurb is out, with astonishing tales by thirteen writers: Albrecht, Ashby, Cha, Deitch, Garcia, Garrison, Hayes, Highsmith, Rucker, Quaglia, Salinas, Watson, What, Worrad!

This brings us into the sixth year of Flurb since the first issue, with 164 stories published in all.

Go to www.flurb.net and be among the first of the sixty thousand or so people who'll be checking out our new issue over the coming months!

Enjoy the gnarl, dear readers, it's good for you.

And when you take a break, come back here and post something encouraging in the comments section below. Our intrepid authors need and deserve your support.

Proofing NESTED SCROLLS

I'm still hanging out in Gotham. Love the roar and bustle. Had a nice reading with Brendan Byrne. Eventually a tape should appear on the Hour of the Wolf radio show, I'll let you know when it's streamable.

Tor Books is about to produce a trade paperback edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. I'd like to clean up any remaining typos in this book, so if you've found some, please let me know over the next week or two—you can simply post the typo as a comment here or email me.

My Complete Stories ebook is selling some copies, thanks for that! (Only $4.95 for a mammoth tome.) I'm glad to have found the self-published ebook alternative to the Kafka castle of traditional publishing. Toothless Inuit on an ice-floe or…rat leaving a sinking ship?

I'll be publishing issue #13 of my webzine Flurb at the end of this month, I have 13 good new stories edited and ready to go, all I need at this point is a few days of production work.

But meanwhile, as mentioned, post any Nested Scrolls typos you find or email me about them.

Crowdsource Proofing of NESTED SCROLLS

I'm still hanging out in Gotham. Love the roar and bustle. Had a nice reading with Brendan Byrne. Eventually a tape should appear on the Hour of the Wolf radio show, I'll let you know when it's streamable.

Tor Books is about to produce a trade paperback edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. I'd like to clean up any remaining typos in this book, so if you've found some, please let me know over the next week or two—you can simply post the typo as a comment here or email me.

My Complete Stories ebook is selling some copies, thanks for that! (Only $4.95 for a mammoth tome.) I'm glad to have found the self-published ebook alternative to the Kafka castle of traditional publishing. Toothless Inuit on an ice-floe or…rat leaving a sinking ship?

I'll be publishing issue #13 of my webzine Flurb at the end of this month, I have 13 good new stories edited and ready to go, all I need at this point is a few days of production work.

But meanwhile, as mentioned, post any Nested Scrolls typos you find or email me about them.

Rucker and Byrne Reading in NYC, Tuesday, March 13

The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings presents:



Rudy Rucker and Brendan Carney Byrne

WHEN: Tuesday, March 13th. Doors open at 6:30 — event begins at 7

WHERE: The SoHo Gallery for Digital Art, 138 Sullivan Street (between Houston & Prince St.) Map. $7 suggested donation.

HOW: By Subway: 6, C, E to Spring St.; A, B D or F to West 4th; 1 train to Houston St; or R, W to Prince St.

[Photo by Brendan Byrne]

Brendan Byrne's fiction has appeared in Flurb; his nonfiction has been published in Strange Horizon, The Brooklyn Rail and Rhizome. His novella The Showing of the Instruments was published in 2011 by Phone Booth Press. He is the editor of the webzine The Orphan.

[Photo by Sylvia Rucker]

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a former computer science professor. He received Philip K. Dick awards for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, now available in the Ware Tetralogy. His fantasy California novel of the afterlife, Jim and the Flims, appeared in 2011, as did his autobiography, Nested Scrolls, which received the Emperor Norton Award. Rudy recently finished writing a 1950s alien invasion novel called The Turing Chronicles, featuring a love affair between Alan Turing and William Burroughs. Rucker took up painting in 2000, and he's had three shows of his pop-surreal works in San Francisco. For ongoing updates, see Rudy's Blog.

Thanks to:

* Reading organized by Jim Freund, Producer and Executive Curator of The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings, and known for his long-running live radio program, Hour of the Wolf, which broadcasts and streams every Wednesday night/Thursday morning from 1:30-3:00 AM. Programs are available by stream for 2 weeks after broadcast.

* The SoHo Gallery for Digital Art is dedicated to re-establishing SoHo as an international center for the development of new artistic forms, concepts and ideas. A screens-instead-of-canvases approach allows a wide selection of art from around the world which would otherwise never make it to the City. The SGDA is available for private gatherings and events of all kinds.

* The New York Review of Science Fiction magazine is celebrating its 21st year!

Subscribe or submit articles to the magazine at New York Review of Science Fiction, PO. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570.